Because She's Kate
by soloscribe
Summary: Follow up to "Witness" as Kate listens to McGee's shocked recall of the night's events, she's reminded too much of her own demons. Character piece for Kate & back story; nothing past friendship here.


_Just a little character piece as a follow up to season 2's episode "Witness." Enjoy. I own nothing and no one, although the dialogue is from the episode, which is property of CBS and its briliant producers and writers. Lots of angst and some back story. This is intended to be angst, some comfort, and all friendship. I don't ship Kate/McGee, although I guess if you want to squint, turn upside down and have psychedelic dreams, you could read it that way. Perhaps there is the vaguest hint of Kibbs (love it!) but can be read as friendship also. Reviews are always appreciated._

It's cold out here, but the chill isn't only in the wind and the plummeting temperatures. Kate wraps her glove-encased hands around the cup of coffee and rounds the ambulance to see McGee sitting there, staring into the middle distance. He's in shock, stunned by the assault on him and by the loss of their only solid link in this case. She knew he had it bad for Erin- he wasn't drooling like Tony would, but he was acting like Erin was the first girl he'd ever met. Puppy love.

And now... he looks so lost, and part of her wants to give him a hug and cry with him. Part of her, the part that spent too much time with three older brothers and in a male-dominated profession, wants to smack him upside the head and tell him to deal with it. She sidles up to him, her softer side taking over. This is why Gibbs sent her for this one- sometimes it takes a woman to handle the job. The women's lib inside her says she should let Gibbs handle it himself. But she knows he didn't nudge her in their junior agent's direction because she's a woman. He did it because she's Kate.

"I should have set up surveillance from inside Erin's apartment," he protests, shuffling the coffee cup behind him and returning the ice pack to the back of his head. He's not wearing a coat, and she can only imagine how frozen his fingers are. Not that he's feeling it right no

_So it begins,_ she sighed silently. Their jobs came with a certain measure of self-doubt, and God knows she had her lion's share of it recently. After seeing the van screech away with Ducky in the back and failing to hit the van with a shot, her first call had been to Gibbs. Promptly following that conversation, she had lost what little dinner she had eaten that night. Moments like that made her question how she ever made it in the Secret Service. She had only lost one person in the service, and she knows exactly how McGee feels right now.

"You were exactly where you were supposed to be," she emphasizes, trying to convince herself as much as him. You never forgot the one you lost.

Very technically speaking, as her sister had reminded her, _Kate_ hadn't lost the girl back in 1998. But her team had, and when one person lost a protectee, the whole team lost the protectee. They couldn't split hairs or point blame on protection details. They were protecting the Matthai family at the time, the Nigerian Ambassador to the United States. Kate was assigned to protect nine-year-old Soleil Mathai, and the girl had adored her. Petite and with endless curiosity, Soleil had wanted to know why Kate did everything that she did, and she did her best to immitate her protector.

On a seemingly quiet evening in March, Kate rotated off of detail and escaped into a few hours of sleep. Two hours into sleep, she woke to her pager and full alert. One agent was down (dead, she later learned), and their protectee was gone. Eleven painstaking days followed, most with dead-ends. _Soleil_ was French for "sun," and truly darkness had touched them as they searched and gathered intelligence. The Matthai's were beside themselves. Everything ended in Norfolk.

Everything tied back to blood diamonds and revenge. Her team was assigned to extraction, and they performed their jobs, but what was left to find hadn't been easy. One of her friends, Thomas Wright, found the closet where Soleil had been kept for most of the eleven days. It stank, and they all fought the urge to gag when the odor of an unwashed body and lack of toilet hit them. The girl was curled in a corner in a ball, and she began to whimper and cower the moment she saw the light.

It wasn't a moment for niceties, and Soleil fought Thomas as he lifted her and directed them to leave immediately. The fight could be heard in the next room over. There wasn't time for soothing words or an opportunity for Soleil to make herself presentable. Kate did her best to murmur assurances as the child whimpered. When they made it past the barricades, she had taken Soleil in her arms, somehow ignoring the smell as the small face buried into her shoulder.

Hands, shaky from minimal food the past days, clung weakly to her as the EMT crew attempted to step in. She held the girl throughout the assessment, holding her the whole way to the hospital and until the Matthais took over at last. The last she heard, Soleil did not speak a word for five months after she was rescued. She never was the same child again.

McGee is talking again, trying to process his thoughts and his memories. Kate thinks that maybe she should be writing this down now. It will be just as hard to say all of this yet again- when he has to give his official statement.

"I rushed in without clearing the room," he continues, voice flat.

Soleil was the first. She nearly lost the little boy that Gibbs assigned to her, and she still can't believe she was nearly killed over spilled milk. It was beyond an amateur's mistake- not to clear the room. The same mistake that nearly killed McGee tonight. Some might not count that as a loss, but she did. Tied to a chair, she had been helpless and her protectee was vulnerable.

Kate was willing to give herself some leeway with Commander Shields, but not much. Ground rules of Secret Service taught her that sometimes you have to protect a person from himself. Saying "no" happened often. It was a matter of life and death. She told Tony it was a bad idea to go running, but she didn't draw the line. Even if Tony was the senior agent, it was her field of expertise. Her job to make the hard calls.

"I should have got him," McGee's blame game isn't over. As hard as she and Tony are when they tease him, Kate knows this is the worst torture: self-doubt, self-loathing.

She should have shot Ducky's killer, or at least clipped his van. Part of her resents McGee right now for stirring up these feelings inside her. These memories that should be buried. There were too many close calls. She should have killed Ari, too. He nearly killed Gerald, and Ducky, and her...

And the most recent incident with Ducky at the funeral parlor... well, everyone knew how that ended. Thankfully, he had escaped with a lot of stitches. Gibbs, of course, was right. They should have had two agents to protect two people. That didn't stop her, however, for blaming her own pride. The thought had occurred to her, that they should have a second person. And yet, she had underestimated the situation. She badly miscalculated how hard was it to protect a hard-sleeping old woman. Now she knew the answer to that one. Experience was a harsh teacher.

McGee won't stop blaming himself, and Kate thinks she might strangle him... or cry. She wants to go for a long run, to burn off the frustration and to get away from this. "Her death was not your fault," she emphasizes a family time. It's true: Erin's death wasn't McGee's fault. And maybe the losses weren't hers. But they were deaths and losses. And some things can't be undone.

She's actually looking forward to the root canal. To a little time away from everything, under Novocain and anything else they want to give her.

Maybe someday McGee will learn to forgive himself. To move beyond this. And maybe he'll teach her how to do that. She still hasn't learned, and she wishes she had her rosary beads with her. Tomorrow night she'll drop by confession. And maybe light a candle. The world needs more light than she can has to offer, but she's here for now. She won't leave McGee alone in the cold.


End file.
